Roberto Rocha

Dr. Rocha is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School. At BWH, Dr. Rocha leads applied informatics research projects and is a faculty member of the Partners Clinical Informatics & Innovation Fellowship program. Dr. Rocha is also the Managing Director of Semedy Inc., a new Boston-based software company focused on knowledge and metadata management using semantic technologies.

Prior to joining Semedy, Dr. Rocha was the Clinical Informatics Director for Partners eCare at Partners HealthCare (2008-2017), where he led enterprise clinical knowledge management activities, including clinical decision support interventions implemented across different clinical systems. Prior to joining BWH, Dr. Rocha was an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah (2000-2008), where he led the design and implementation of a distributed data and knowledge management infrastructure to support clinical and translational research. Concurrently with his faculty appointment at the University of Utah, Dr. Rocha was an Executive Vice-President and the Lead Informaticist at Remedy Informatics (2006-2007) and a Senior Medical Informaticist at Intermountain Healthcare (2000-2006). During his tenure at Intermountain, Dr. Rocha managed clinical knowledge management activities and data definitions used by Intermountain’s longitudinal healthcare record. Prior to Intermountain, Dr. Rocha was an Associate Professor of Medical Informatics at the Federal University of Paraná (1997-2000), Brazil, and the Chief Information Officer of a 650-bed teaching hospital with a homegrown clinical information system (1998-2000).

Dr. Rocha completed a PhD in Medical Informatics from the University of Utah (1996) and is the first recipient of the Reed Gardner Award for Faculty Excellence from the University of Utah Department of Biomedical Informatics (2006). Dr. Rocha received his MD from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil (1987). His areas of interest include application of knowledge management principles and processes to biomedicine; modeling and representation of biomedical ontologies, data, and knowledge; and development and implementation of interoperability standards. Dr. Rocha is am elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

Education

• Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, PR, Brazil M.D. 1982-87 Medicine
• University of São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil Resident 1988-90 Medical Informatics
• University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT Ph.D. 1990-96 Medical Informatics

Positions and Honors

Hospital & University Appointments:

• 1990 Information Systems Manager, Santa Casa Hospital, PR, Brazil
• 1997-2000 Chief Information Officer, Hospital de Clinicas, Federal Univ. of Paraná, PR, Brazil
• 2007-2008 Director, Federated Utah Research Translational Health e-Repository, University of Utah, UT
• 2008-present Lead Informatics Investigator, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA

Professional Positions:

• 1993-1994 Medical Informatics Consultant, 3M Health Information Systems, UT
• 2000-2006 Senior Medical Informaticist, Intermountain Health Care, UT
• 2006-2007 Executive VP, Chief Medical Officer, and Lead Informaticist, RemedyMD, UT
• 2008-2014 Senior Corporate Manager – Clinical Knowledge Management and Decision Support, Partners eCare, Partners HealthCare System, MA
• 2013-2017 Clinical Informatics Director, Partners eCare, Partners HealthCare System, MA
• 2016-2017 Leader, Data Coordinating Center: Observational Cohort Evaluation of Parenteral Zanamivir, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA
• 2017-2018 Leader, Data Coordinating Center: Observation study to characterize clinical management practices for critically ill patients with influenza, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA
• 2018-present Managing Director, Semedy, Inc., Boston, MA

Academic & Teaching Appointments:

• 1990-1995 Research Assistant, Department of Medical Informatics, University of Utah, UT
• 1995-1997 Research Associate, Department of Medical Informatics, University of Utah, UT
• 1997-1998 Visiting Professor, Department of Surgery, Federal University of Paraná, PR, Brazil
• 1997-2002 Affiliated Faculty, Clinical Surgery, Federal University of Paraná, PR, Brazil
• 1998-2000 Associate Professor, Surgery, Federal University of Paraná, PR, Brazil
• 2001-2008 Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, UT
• 2008-2014 Lecturer on Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, MA
• 2009-2014 Lecturer, Graduate Program in Health Informatics, College of Computer and Information Science Northeastern University, MA
• 2014-present Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, MA

Honors:

• 1990-1994 Scholarship to pursue Ph.D. studies. National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Ministry of Science and Technology, Brazil
• 1993-1994 Dissertation grant award. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR), Department of Health and Human Services, USA
• 1997 Post-doctoral research award. National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Ministry of Science and Technology, Brazil
• 1999-2000 Investigator award. National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Ministry of Science and Technology, Brazil
• 2006 Reed M. Gardner Award for Faculty Excellence (first recipient), Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah School of Medicine, USA
• 2009 Elected Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics, USA.